F12 is almost done !
I think we have produced one of our best releases yet. Thanks to
everybody who has helped making it a great desktop. As always, there are
many exciting new things: Abrt, Bluetooth networking and sound, Dracut,
Empathy, IPv6, Thusnelda, etc. But we have also put a lot of effort into
making this work well and look sharp. And it shows !
There are certainly still bugs to be found and fixed, and we will spend
some time after the release mostly focused on handling incoming bugs,
probably until around the time that GNOME 2.28.2 is released (right
before Christmas).
Even so, there are some changes to the Desktop spin that I want to make
early in the F13 cycle, and that I want to outline here:
- Drop the CD size limitation and target a larger usb stick. We have
discussed this in the past. The main motivation for this is that we have
to fight every release cycle to make things fit on a CD, and we don't
have room to include our default office suite or example content.
- Include OpenOffice instead of abiword. OpenOffice is the premier open
source office suite, and abiword is on the current live CD purely for
size reasons.
- Use shotwell as the default photo management app instead of gthumb.
This may be a bit of a surprise for some. Shotwell is a relatively new
application, that is in Fedora only since F12. I have mentioned it on
this list before. The 0.3.0 release that has just come out is very close
to the feature set that we'd ideally expect to have in a default photo
management app. It also starts very fast.
- Remove remaining Bluecurve icons from fedora-gnome-theme. This will
probably leave some holes in the menus, and we'll need help from artists
to fill those.
- Include example content. We've wanted to do this for a long time, but
CD size limitations have always prohibited it. Now we can do it, but of
course, we still need to collect good material. If you have proposals
for suitably licensed documents, movies, music, etc that are
interesting, cool or just funny, let us know ! It might also be a good
idea to include some promotional material that could be of use for
Fedora ambassadors. If you have proposals in this direction, let us know
as well !
Beyond these organizational changes to the live image, I think a focus
of our feature work for F13 will be around software installation and
updates. Some of our thoughts for how installation and updates should
ideally behave can be found on the wiki:
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/UpdateExperiencehttp://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/InstallExperience
For application installation, Martin Bacovsky has already started
working on an online application database that is tied to pkgdb:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-October/msg01083.html
Some of us will be at FUDCon in a few weeks, where we can hopefully
discuss these ideas in more depth.
Matthias

Hi,
Are there any plans to include a good backup tool for the desktop by
default? I have put up deja-dup for review if anyone is interested in
checking it out
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=540761
Frontend for duplicity (which uses rsync library and gpg keys for
encryption) written in Vala. It is a simple backup tool for GNOME and
integrates with Nautilus bookmarks etc.
Features:
• Support for local or remote backup locations, including Amazon S3
• Securely encrypts and compresses your data
• Incrementally backs up, letting you restore from any particular backup
• Schedules regular backups
• Integrates well into your GNOME desktop
Rahul

I'd like to propose moving comps to fedorahosted git.
Why? Because CVS is a pain.
I can work on fixing the automated releng tasks that use comps.
What I'd like to know is if doing this at some point over the
next few weeks (say, post-Alpha) would be a problem for people.
If it is, we can push it off until after F13 ships.
Bill

Hi all,
I've had a look through some of the archives, but I haven't seen any
discussion about this for a while, and it was recommended I try this list
for some comments.
Has anyone looked at a package for desktopcouchdb for Fedora?
https://launchpad.net/desktopcouch
It's gone through a few releases, and it's a dependancy for new releases
of the Gwibber micro-blogging client, which is currently in Fedora (if a
few versions behind).
I'm new to packaging, but I have resources to run some VMs to build and
test to get things working.
I would be interested in putting together a package, along with updated
packages for Gwibber, if there was some interest?
Cheers,
Dagan McGregor

So, it's the time around when the design-team provides new package with
new backgrounds for next fedora release. It's currently under review
[1]. One thing was bugging me -- the -kde subpackage provides (since
constantine-backgrounds-kde) system-backgrounds-kde and the main package
used to provide system-backgrounds (again since
constantine-backgrounds). I've now been more throughout and made a
-gnome subpackage for the gnome specific stuff which should now inherit
the sytem-backgrounds provides. And I was wondering whether you people
use it (or whether it's useful for you at all), and whether it would be
better to provide system-backgrounds-gnome instead. Any thoughts on
this?
Also, when the package is reviewed and repos, could someone update the
relevant gnome package to make it (goddard-backgrounds-gnome have all
what's needed for Desktop Spin) default in f13 (and probably f14 since
rawhide has been already separated)?
Thanks,
Martin
References:
[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=566290

As part of the ongoing theme renovations in the desktop spin, we would
like to try a new cursor theme for F13 to replace the aging Bluecurve
cursors.
After some looking around, we have found the DMZ theme by Jakub Steiner
to be a good candidate, since it is high-quality and conservative enough
to be suitable as a default cursor theme.
It is available now in the dmz-cursor-themes package. Please give it a
try and let me know what you think,
Matthias

Hi,
I think the blue curve is O.K. but if you want to refresh maybe the cursor theme should go with the rest of the things (the cursor pointer, the background, the icons, etc.)
The cursor theme may be a motif taken from the default background, for example.
Regards